Josette Akresh-Gonzales
The Tree Line
The larch trees are moving north
with the tree line. There is no god;
great boreal forests circle our planet
in an almost unbroken ring. No god put
the plants in a greenhouse, so they’d
grow faster and higher. There is no
god; the larch had followed their own
algorithm for thousands of years. Spruce,
jack pine, lichen, every tree its own noise.
Pines are social creatures. Yew live forever.
It's quite easy to see the tree line moving;
it's fair to say we know enough. There is
no god; there are three stations in Siberia
monitoring the release of methane.
Ice beats south in winter, north in summer,
and the boreal exhales, with far more trees
than all the rainforests put together.
Their roots pump water inland, overturning
the entire Arctic ocean. There is no god;
the great ring of evergreen licks clean
the atmosphere and turns out water
for us, we hope, forever.
Chevrutah¹
"Scholars who sit alone to study the Torah become stupid"
—Yosi b. R. Hanina, Talmud, Berakhot 63b²
A former racehorse named Midnight Lovin’ twitches
his haunches in the dusty corral. He misreads
the prompt, doesn’t know how to turn clockwise
when Beth leads him home in the spring of 2017
because humans designed the flat, oval tracks,
and humans preferred counter-clockwise.
Turn left, turn left, turn left — NASCAR rules,
speed-skating rules — life’s little mysteries.³
In the great plains, vast open spaces,
eerie silence…but any feeling of emptiness…
is an illusion. The plains of our planet support
the greatest gatherings of wildlife on Earth.
Beth, firm and straight, in her heeled boots: We can
shoulder this burden together! Every day enters
the horse’s stall holding in her hand a sweet gift
his lips open. Persuades him to turn, even jump.
Two animals talk in their kinesics of healing:
a sentence aloud, then pause, then either partner
can ask a question, can ask a question, can comment.
Knees almost touching, ears swiveling, active listening
in the heat of discussion, wave their hands, even shout.
Job, for example, asks [ ], Why do innocents suffer?⁴
Thus [ ] answered Job from the wind in the grass,
Have you given the horse his strength?
Have you clothed his neck with fierceness?⁵
Midnight drops to his side and rolls over, tracing
angels in the dust. Over and over his hooves rise
and run in the air, his long tail swishing a cloud.
Beth, the witness. Round about his teeth are terror.⁶
At the heart of all that happens here is a single
living thing: grass. This miraculous plant covers
a quarter of all the lands of the Earth. Grasslands
exist wherever there is a little rain but not enough⁷
He snorts at flies, shies in cold weather — as
although Job blessed with fourteen thousand sheep
and six thousand camels and a thousand yoke
of oxen and a thousand she-asses, and after this
lived a hundred and forty years…⁸
his wealth restored, he turns in circles,
completely befuddled with gratitude,
nervously shaking his head at his luck.
As one summer day Midnight refuses to budge.
His eight-pound heart utters questions he can’t articulate,
stomps his black hoof into the ground, shakes
his big head side to side, his mane whispering
to his withers as Beth’s hand and voice in his ear
say sh sh I’m sorry I’m sorry.
¹ “Chavrusa is an Aramaic word meaning "friendship"[1] or "companionship";[4] it can also mean "group of fellows".[5] The Rabbis of the Mishnah and Gemara uses the cognate term chaver (חבר, "friend" or "companion" in Hebrew) to refer to the one with whom a person studies Torah.[6][7] In contemporary usage, chavrusa is defined as a "study partnership".[6][8][9]” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavrusa)
² Sinclair, Dr. Julian (5 November 2008). "Chavruta". The Jewish Chronicle. Retrieved 26 June 2011. Via https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chavrusa
³ https://www.livescience.com/32442-why-are-races-run-counterclockwise.html
⁴ https://jewishcurrents.org/the-horse-in-jewish-religious-text
⁵ https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt2739.htm (Job 39: 19)
⁶ Job 41:14
⁷ Planet Earth 07 Great Plains Part 01 (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W30QNDapVDA)
⁸ https://mechon-mamre.org/p/pt/pt2742.htm (Job 42:12,16)
Josette Akresh-Gonzales is the author of "Apocalypse on the Linoleum" (Lily Poetry Review Press). Her work has been published or is forthcoming in The Southern Review, The Indianapolis Review, Atticus Review, JAMA, The Pinch, The Journal, Breakwater Review, PANK, and many other journals. A recent poem has been included in the anthology Choice Words (Haymarket). She co-founded the journal Clarion and was its editor for two years. Josette lives in the Boston area with her husband and two boys and rides her bike to work at a nonprofit medical publisher. Website: josettepoet.com.
Note about these poems: These two poems are part of a project I'm working on, celebrating nature, science, humanity, and the possibility of divinity (the supreme and ultimate reality? creator of the universe?) with each section of the book titled with the same name as the BBC documentary "Planet Earth" episode. Within the sections there is either one long poem ("Mountains," for example) or multiple poems. "The Tree Line" is part of the "Ice Worlds" section, and "Chevrutah" is in the "Great Plains" section.